Sramana Mitra: What happens in 1998? Philippe d’Offay: You have to go back a little bit because the two questions overlap with one another. There’s a lot of news lately about medical errors. According to a Johns Hopkins, more than a quarter million patients die due to medical errors a year. In 1991, my grandfather
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Philippe has turned ~$300k of friends and family investment into a $6.5 million ARR business. Read on to learn how. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking that last year, you did over $10 million with 50 customers. I can see that business model going to $40 million to $50 million in the next three years. You’ve told me that you’re switching business models, and your focus is going to be on the
Sramana Mitra: It’s, effectively, becoming a competitor to Mechanical Turk and UpWork. Stephanie Leffler: Absolutely. UpWork also happens to be our partner. We’re fully integrated with UpWork and have an API integration. If you’re hiring freelancers there and you want to scale your project, people will often use OneSpace. UpWork provides people but they don’t provide
Sramana Mitra: How long have you sold the service? Stephanie Leffler: We started in January 2011 – about five years. Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit more about how this services business ramped up. Amazon was sending you people. You were managing their larger Mechanical Turk project using your platform. Did all leads come from
Stephanie Leffler: I remember Amazon called us about a year into this project and said, “How are you pushing so much work through Mechanical Turk?” We said, “We built this software platform to manage it, so it’s really easy for us to push a lot of work out there.” They asked us to come out
Sramana Mitra: All this was organically built or did you raise any financing in this process? Stephanie Leffler: We didn’t raise any financing. We’re both very happy at this point that we didn’t. It wasn’t really by design but it was more because we didn’t even understand that those sort of things were available. Sramana
Sramana Mitra: You’re going way too fast for the story. Remember, we are doing an Entrepreneur Journeys story. Stephanie Leffler: The key portion of switching gears from trying to be a retail business to starting our e-commerce journey was out of complete necessity. We were in a situation where we didn’t have enough money to